In this demonstration, Christopher Parsons walks through the Sustainability Advisor tool, showing how it grounds its knowledge in three curated sources: a comprehensive sustainability guide (covering embodied carbon, toxic chemical avoidance, etc.), a filtered sustainability track from the course catalog, and a library of short sustainability videos. He first illustrates a straightforward query—how to evaluate embodied carbon during early design—showcasing the advisor’s ability to pull relevant information from these sources. He then presents a more complex scenario where a client resists investing in indoor air quality improvements. The advisor generates a step‑by‑step, customized response that addresses cost concerns, builds a positive ROI case, lists key IAQ strategies with citations, and recommends a targeted course on IAQ. Parsons emphasizes the power of agents to deliver detailed, citation‑backed, and educationally linked answers when the underlying knowledge base is well‑grounded.
Chapters
I'm going to go to projects and practice. And in understanders and codes, we've got a sustainability guide. And this has a bunch of information, you know, about how we approach embodied carbon or how we approach toxic chemical avoidance and so on. And so you can see who authored the guide, but I've also given instant answers in our sustainability advisor. So let's look at some grounding knowledge. So you can see that we've grounded this in the course catalog, and we filtered it. You can see I've filtered it on the track equals sustainability. So all the sustainability courses, that sustainability guide we were just looking at, and then the sustainability team has been running this series of shorts. So we also grounded it in that video library of sustainability shorts. And so if I look at some of our past questions, Um, so, for example, how do we evaluate embodied carbon during early design? Um, you can see that it goes through, answers the question, and is using that grounding knowledge to answer it. This is a more complicated one, and this is partly why I get really excited about agents, is you can get these very detailed questions, and then if your knowledge is there— we'll talk about that multiple times— but if you do have the knowledge, you can get pretty interesting customized dynamic answers. So in this one, I asked the sustainability advisor, well, I told this sustainability advisor that I have a client who's pushing back against investing in improving indoor air quality in their project. And I'm wondering if you can help me address their concerns about cost and delaying the project, compose an argument back to them about why this is important and it's a good investment and kind of make the case for a positive ROI. And then 3, make a list of key strategies we'll employ. And you can see it went step by step through and it broke out and it addressed the client's concerns. It talked about the positive ROI case, and then it went through and it talked about all the different strategies again with citations to each of those strategies that we're going to use. And then it also suggested a course to go into around improving indoor air quality.